Socialist historians met in London last week for a conference on 1956, a key year which saw the Suez crisis and a workers’ revolution in Hungary. Stan Newens, the former left wing Labour MP, was a young activist in London at the time. He spoke to Socialist Worker about the impact of that year on working class people.
Read SR, our new monthly supplement, with a lead article on Venezuela, an interview with leading Marxist David Harvey and great columnists including China Miéville.
‘We are going to intervene in the coming days. I think there will be collateral damage but we have to impose our force, there is no other way."
The theory of alienation is Karl Marx’s account of how capitalist society distorts human relationships – both between people and between themselves and the world around them.
The organisation People and Planet hosts a website called "ethical careers". It’s aimed at people who would like a job which doesn’t involve exploiting or oppressing other people.
It's like keeping up with a force of nature as we scoot from one engagement to another in George Galloway’s constituency of Bethnal Green & Bow in east London.
The lesson of history is that the rich like to push the poor around. From the Highland Clearances in Scotland in the late 18th and early 19th centuries, to forced removals in apartheid South Africa and Chinese dam projects, those with power want to tell those without it where and how to live.
The planned redevelopment of east London will carve out local people. The plans, and the lack of consultation, show how little democracy and representation lies at the heart of the New Labour councils which run the area. Sarah Ruiz, a Respect councillor in Newham, spoke to Socialist Worker about the impact on local communities.
In last week’s column, I looked at the way in which the continuation of neo-liberal policies by New Labour has resulted in the maintenance of high levels of poverty and huge increases in inequality and insecurity.
Since the public sector strikes of November-December 1995 France has been in the vanguard of the resistance to neo-liberal policies in Europe. The French referendum on the European constitution on 29 May 2005 marked a decisive defeat for this attempt by the ruling classes of the continent to hard-wire free market policies into European society.
The victory in the referendum is important but its effects are over-estimated. It’s clear that the tone of the no vote was given by the left, but nevertheless 20-30 percent of the no vote came from the right.
The state of Israel was founded in 1948 when Zionist militias — with the connivance of British authorities — embarked on a brutal ethnic cleansing programme that drove over 750,000 Palestinians from their homes, an event known as the Naqba, or catastrophe.
